The Weekly Round-Up: 18.08.06

Ever since crazy old Waylon Cratchett emerged from a Californian mountainside in 1849 to declare "I don't know what it is but it sure is shiny" man has had a fascination with the potential of gold to turn pipe dreams into reality.

Of course gold was nothing new but the role it played in defining the entrepreneurial spirit of Americans was immense. In fact much of that spirit appeared again during the second California 'gold rush' - the dot-com boom.

But it seems metaphor, simile and reality have become slightly mixed up in the minds of at least one US tech company, which this week decided its best chance of 'striking gold' in the new economy is to actually go digging for it.

AOL, working on a hunch which might generously be called outlandish, has won the right to dig up the garden belonging to the parents of a convicted spammer, so convinced is it that there is buried treasure there.

That's right, AOL believes Davis Wolfgang Hawke - or Blackbeard to his friends - has been burying booty in his parents' backyard.

Now, because Hawke owes $12.8m awarded to AOL in a federal court case over the spammer's activities, the internet giant has brought in the services of bulldozers to unearth what treasures there might be.

Hawke's mother told the media: "I don't care if they dig up the entire yard. They're just going to make fools of themselves."

AOL said it will try to accommodate Hawke's parents by not being too obtrusive. (Clearly these must be stealth bulldozers it plans to use.)

Hawke's mother added: "There's absolutely no reason for them to think that Davis Hawke would be stupid enough to bury gold on our property."

Oh no, his mother told the media, she's convinced the gold is actually buried in the White Mountains 100 miles north of Boston. So it wasn't the alleged burying of the gold she thought insane, just the location. (The Round-Up suspects even now there is a rush on shovels and maps of the White Mountains taking place in Boston.)

"My son is long gone," she added, though the Round-Up suspects that should be 'My son is Long Gone Silver'.

Arrrrr! Shiver the timbers!

While the Round-Up can't help thinking this is what happens at AOL if you go watch Pirates of the Caribbean the night before a company brainstorming session, it seems the folks at AOL are genuinely convinced X marks the spot.

Possibly pre-empting a number of the Round-Up's earlier jokes, a spokesman for AOL said: "The dig isn't something out of Treasure Island."

"This is a court-directed, judge-approved legal process that is simply aimed at responsibly recovering hidden assets, m' hearties!" he added, apart from the last bit.

You really couldn't make this up.

While AOL is getting its hands muddy in a Massachusetts backyard, two well-known brands have seen their own names dragged through the mud a little this week after both showed fresh signs of a willingness to engage their lawyers before they engage their brains - further evidence that you're never too big to be petty.

Apple, for starters, continued its meteoric fall from 'cool' this week with news that its lawyers were once again flexing their muscles, this time taking on a number of companies who use 'pod' in their branding.

It seems Apple believes it should have sole rights to 'pod' because of the iPod music player, launched five years ago, around the same time the word 'pod' entered the English language (give or take a few hundred years.)

And while Apple was putting the boot in to any notion it is a likeable company, Google was going about its own reverse-PR campaign, sending letters to the media and selected bloggers warning them not to continue using 'google' as a verb.

The company insists such use is a serious breach of its trademark and the use of phrases such as 'to google' somebody or something is destroying its brand as 'google' becomes a generic byword for internet search.

But the Round-Up can't help thinking somebody is taking themselves a little too seriously here.

A spokeswoman for Google told silicon.com: "We think it's important to make the distinction between using the word Google to describe using Google to search the internet and using the word Google to generally describe searching the internet. It has some serious trademark issues."

What Google fears - or what highly paid lawyers have told it to fear - is 'genericide', where a brand becomes killed off by its generic overuse - after all, how many 'hoovers' are actually made by Hoover?

But one seasoned Silicon Valley PR pro certainly isn't convinced. "Googling is already common parlance for searching on the internet. And there is only one place you go to 'google'," said Morgan McLintic.

And he joins the legions of others panning this action as barmy. After all, anybody who says 'I'm going to google that person... " no doubt says so because that's the search they use. Surely nobody says anything similar and then fires up Ask.

This isn't genericide - this is market domination. It seems Google has been too busy fighting to notice that it's already won.

If anything, the perpetuation of 'googling' will ensure its message lives on in the search world and marketing in that area takes care of itself, enabling Google to turn its marketing guns on other areas such as desktop search, hosted email and on-demand business tools.

And by digging its heels in on this issue Google is clutching defeat from the jaws of victory as people start to notice the cracks appearing in its once cool façade.

Certainly the blogosphere - Google's core constituency - is unimpressed.

"This should be the ultimate complement and I cannot believe Google sees it differently," wrote blogger and computing graduate Frank Gruber.

Steve Rubel, another blogger, branded it "one of the worst PR moves in history".

Another 'right on' brand - which is possibly not quite so 'right on' as we may have thought - is The Guardian newspaper, which has been carrying ads on its website for a company, called Zango, whose business model revolves around finding new and interesting ways to get adware onto users' machines.

The latest method attracts surfers with clips of car crashes and smashes - an interesting angle in itself - which can be viewed only once the user agrees to adware being installed on their machines.

These applications aren't illegal but they are fairly widely discredited by the IT security industry and not often a practice that mainstream media outlets such as The Guardian are seen to endorse.

To Zango's credit they engaged in a frank and open discussion with silicon.com as to why the media and the IT security industry are wrong to label them as pests. They also called into question the notion that full screen pop-up ads are annoying.

The Guardian meanwhile remained tight-lipped as to why it carried the ads. Surely they can't need the money that badly. But we guess we'll never know.

And finally, when Jerry Lee Lewis sang "Goodness gracious great balls of fire", it's unlikely it was exploding laptops he had on his mind (or his lap). But it's certainly a sentiment that could well have been shared by many users of Dell laptops had the company not intervened this week to recall more than four million batteries after a few of the company's laptop PCs burst into flames.

Fortunately nobody has been injured, though pictures on that there interweb thing suggest the problem is far from a few worrying sparks and more like a full-on blaze when these babies go up.

The Round-Up can only imagine the possible outcome if somebody was hunched over their computer when the unit ignited on their lap.

(Right now Round-Up readers across the country are crossing their legs and wincing.)

Some readers have also expressed concerns about the unlikely event of one of these laptops choosing to do its party piece on an airplane, given the current heightened security concerns.

So in order to make sure none of these worst case scenarios occur Dell has announced an unprecedented move to recall the batteries.

Quite how anybody goes about recalling four million of anything is beyond the Round-Up, which is probably why it sits up here in its ivory tower sending out weekly emails while others do the hard work. But if you are the proud but slightly concerned owner of an Inspiron, Latitude or Precision laptop likely to have shipped between April 2004 and 18 July 2006 you might like to give Dell a bell on 00800 3033 4044.

In the meantime the company suggests you eject the battery and run the laptop from its AC power supply.

And finally, finally, thank you to the teams who took part in last night's charity rounders tournament, organised by silicon.com and its publisher CNET Networks UK on behalf of Computer Aid International.

The event saw eight teams from the tech PR industry and CNET take to the field and the eventual winners on the night were the good folk at Brands2Life who hit their umpteenth home run of the night, landing somewhere in the Finchley area, to secure the trophy just as the sun was setting on Hyde Park and on the hopes and dreams of the other teams - not least of all beaten finalists Inferno and third-placed Berkeley PR.

Also taking part on the night were the wonderful people from Cohn & Wolfe, Hotwire and Lewis - stars one and all. Thank you to everybody who took part and contributed to Computer Aid International.

And thank you also to the excellent people at Sourcewire.com who sponsored the event.

The money raised is part of a major fundraising effort for Computer Aid International. You can find out more here.

Until next week, read some news:

• Twenty-four million pay for VoIP

• Three-quarters of techies hate their jobs

• Pay-as-you-drive plan panned

• Mobile video to take off by 2009

• dotMobi to auction top-drawer names